Hi guys!! It's come to my attention that a LOT of you are using the ScrapMatters gallery to host your images to post here. This needs to stop. Its called hotlinking (aka bandwidth theft), and its bad for SM! It makes the gallery and site lag and its basically stealing bandwidth! Please read more about what hotlinking is
HERE.
The images you upload to a scrap site, should only be used on that scrap site. Not outside sites. Because you are using that site's bandwidth to view it. Instead, you need to host your own images at an image hosting site, like
photobucket,
imageshack or
smugmug. It's free to set up an account.
You can TOTALLY make your images LINK to your credits page, you just can't use the image's URL (the one ending in .jpg) from the SM gallery, to make your photo appear in ANY thread that isn't on SM's forum. Does that make sense?
I know many of you have spent hours posting LOs in the venue threads here at MouseScrappers, so you don't need to go back and fix anything. Just from here on out, please do NOT use the SM image URLs to host your LO images. I know that none of you would purposefully do anything to hurt ScrapMatters. I know it was unintentional - just make sure to stop hotlinking from here on out. No hard feelings!!
Again - making you image link or posting links to SM for credits = fine.
Using the image URL from the SM gallery (or any non-image hosting site for that matter) = not ok.
I know this isn't the most convenient thing, but it has to be done. We can't be stealing other site's bandwidth!! K?? We don't want to get ourselves in trouble AGAIN!
Thanks for your cooperation everyone!! Let me know if you have any questions!